No Time to Wave Goodbye by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online

residuals wouldn’t have paid for
No Time to Wave Goodbye.
    “Let’s change the subject. Subjects. From Mafia money and mad mothers.”
    “That could be an acronym,” Beth said. “Mad Mothers Against Mafia Money. Okay. How did you get Ben to do it?”
    She expected the usual:
Piece of cake,
or
Call me irresistible.
    Instead, Vincent was strangely forthcoming. He said, “Ma, I had to literally get down on my knees. Ask Kenny at the restaurant. It was last winter. I had all the B-roll done and Rob and I did all the pre-interviews with the families. But it still … didn’t fit. They knew about us. They weren’t going to open up to me the way they would to Ben.”
    “They knew about us?”
    Vincent stared at her. Was she kidding?
    “Yeah, Ma. Ben is like, one of the great legends of kidnapping, no offense.” Either these people knew because they had joined that family of the probably damned no one wanted to join or because the story of “little Ben Cappadora” had captured the affection of glossy magazines for years, with a huge new transfusion of press after Ben was found. That alone opened the door, as Vincent had always known it would, for all the years—and it seemed like a hundred years—he had thought about making the picture. If Ben had never been taken, Vincent would never have conceived of it. Hell, he would never have been a filmmaker. Vincent would have been doing exactly what his brother was doing—unless he was doing time.
    “Cappadora,” people would say, rolling his last name around in their mouths like a taste. Even girls at college, once they mentioned him to their parents or someone older, would ask, “Are you …
that
Cappadora?”
    “Actually, I’m the other Cappadora,” he would tell them. It was his shtick. “My brother is the miracle boy.”
    His family minded that people couldn’t forget their past—the thing that made them who they were. But more than anything, they minded how Ben treated them, which was totally nice … like a good friend of the family or something. He was different with Vincent and Ker, but except for Grandpa Angelo, he sometimes barely gave the rest of them the time of day. Basically, it killed the parents and the grandparents that Ben never gave an inch when it came to his insistence that he was not the same kind of Cappadora the rest of them were. Ben didn’t remember. And he wouldn’t pretend to.
    Vincent remembered … probably more than he would admit.
    It wasn’t the stuff people expected him to remember: All the magazine covers, Kerry cutting off all her hair, his father sitting him on the bar at his uncle Augie’s restaurant. He knew all these things only from his ma’s forty-two thousand albums of black-and-white pictures with their little black paper corners. A whole wall of identical albums with little labels on the back to show the year, except some years were missing entirely and some didn’t match and had hardly any pictures in them and what there were had the oversaturated, loopy carnival quality that proved they’d been reprints given to them by relatives.
    His mother’s pictures were severe, classical compositions, in which even the shadows were characters: Stairways looked like the inside of shells and a car lot like a mess of gumballs. Beth’s were gallery-worthy photography, at least to Vincent’s eyes. Ma’s head was a lens. One of the pictures of the three of them walking away from her was in the Art Institute, another in the Similet Museum of Photography in Boston. He had a print of that one. It was taken on a street back up where they used to live in Wisconsin, on the Fourth of July. He and Ben were holding Kerry’s hands and virtually dragging her behind them. Ma caught them just as Kerry went airborne, one of her rubber sandalsdangling from a toe. He remembered that day for the fight that Ben had had with their parents because he didn’t want to go.
    He wanted to stay with George, with “Dad.”
    Vincent remembered that